Every morning, my daughter and I have breakfast together. It’s imperative to me that she has it every day; studies have touted the multiple benefits of having breakfast. Plus, she’s honestly Linda Blair from the Exorcist when she doesn’t have it. That’s an added incentive.

I either have oatmeal or cereal mixed with yogurt; she often has cereal, fruit, and yogurt. She drinks milk and I drink my coffee, just with cream. And beside my coffee lay my two magnesium pills (for my migraines) and my tab and a half of Prozac.

We are not a house who hides things. We burp loud and have loud emotions and make big mistakes and both the parents and kid say sorry in our house. We also don’t hide the fact that Mommy takes two different kinds of pills in the morning: one for her muscle health, and one for her brain health.

The learning process started slowly. My daughter first noticed the black and white pills on the table, and exclaimed as any three-year old would, “Me have!” I then proceeded to educate her that she cannot just pick up any pill and take it; that these were for adults, and if kids had to take them, adults would inform them what and when.

She then asked, “What dat do?”

“One helps Mama to have less headaches. The other helps Mama’s brain to work well.”

This was followed by a few days, where on the playground, or after nap time, my daughter would trot up to me and ask, “Where is my brain?” And I’d point to her head, and she’d remember, and trot off.

I was fully confident in the way I was handling things until a few days ago, when bleary-eyed, I turned to my daughter at breakfast, and she asked quizzically,

“When I’m an adult, I will take pills?”

I wanted to choke on my cereal.

In the sentence she uttered, I felt the judgment of a million anti-medication people yelling at me, thinking I’ve set my kid up for a life of drug addiction. I felt the despair of a mother who, having her own mental health struggles, was worried she was raising a child who had to be on medication to be happy. I felt the uncertainty of my daughter, who knew that these “pills” held some importance, and, was it something desirable? Something to be scared of?

I knew this wasn’t true; that one day, she’d have the cognitive ability to wrap her mind around the fact that I’d made a healthy decision for myself, but for now, it stung.

Even in today’s somewhat-enlightened society, being a mother on medication is not something you yell from the rooftops. There are the types who believe that everything can be solved through the chiropractor and through organic, gluten-free food, but that is simply not true. And those types feel free to pass judgment on those who actually have experience with mental illness. There are cases, cases like me in which the person feels suicidal unless they are on the correct dosage of medication.

More power to the people who can solve their depressive episodes with a change in exercise routine. I cannot. More power to the people who can take away their anxiety by practicing mindfulness skills. I cannot. People like me are wired differently, perhaps by biological makeup, or perhaps by early trauma. There is nothing worse about us. We haven’t tried less or made less of an effort.

I mean, perhaps I wouldn’t experience depression or anxiety if I didn’t work full-time as a therapist and mother, and didn’t owe thousands of dollars in student loans. My life simply doesn’t afford me time to spend at a Zen Buddhist retreat for weeks on end.

So what do I want my daughter to know? When she’s grown and ready to handle this information?

I want her to know her Mama spent years trying to self-medicate her depression and anxiety through alcohol and numbing eating behaviors, and that during that period, her cholesterol went up and her blood pressure reached dangerously low levels. I want her to know she tried exercise as a form of endorphin release, but that it ended up becoming obsessive. I want her to know that once Mama took those prescribed-by-a-doctor pills, she was able to stop screaming and she was able to be a good Mama. I want her to know that her Mama finally realized her therapist was right about it being ok to rely on something to feel like she wanted to live on this planet. I want her to know her Mama chose life, and not being a martyr, and not suffering. And I want her to know it’s ok to rely on something, if need be, too. That it wouldn’t be something she did wrong; it would be an act of bravery to admit she needed help.

Most importantly, I want her to know:

Just because Mama takes pills, doesn’t mean you’re going to.

And that’s what I told her uncertain, quizzical face that morning.

“No, your brain works great. You might not ever need pills honey. Mama’s brain just works a little different.”

Today it was painful to be alive. Every fiber of my being was uncomfortable; I couldn’t stand the weight of my body today. It hung on me. I felt it in my jeans and felt every bite in my stomach. If you think I’m being dramatic, I’m not; this is how I experience things sometimes, as someone in recovery from an eating disorder. Ask someone else you know who’s in recovery from one.

I have days like this. Bad days. Days when I envision myself swinging into a binge cycle again. Days when I envision swinging into a restrictive cycle as a result of the aforementioned binge cycle. And I went into recovery ten (!!) years ago. Sad and destructive? Hardly. Realistic, I think. Given the other comorbid diagnoses I’ve dealt with.

I’ve talked about the “once you’ve recovered, you’ve recovered!” camp for a long time. The people who claimed they had a “lightbulb” moment and never turned back, never put their body down again, never consulted with ED once more. OK, being a bit (a bit) more humble now, I’ll bite (no pun intended): I bet there are a select few who’ve had this experience. Perhaps the same amount who’ve married someone they’ve never fought with, or who had a mind-numbing spiritual experience and never craved a drink again. But for most of us bozos on the bus, I just don’t think it’s that simple.

(Speaking of that, I really wanted to drink today. But I didn’t. Whoop de frickin da.)

For most of us, we wake up and don’t have time to meditate for twenty perfect minutes, and no, we weren’t going to wake up twenty minutes earlier, because we were up tossing and turning/up with our kids and needed that extra 20. For most of us, we’re shot out of a cannon when our kid peels our eyelids open with their fingers/when our cat meows in our face. We then head downstairs to find cat puke right in front of the bathroom doorway, and in between reaching for the bathroom cleaner, silently bemoan the fact that we still owe 25,000 in student loans and will never be able to afford a house – now, now we are judging ourselves for not being mindful and worrying senselessly, and our daughter is yelling for the TV to be turned on, that ever-destructive-causer-of-doom TV, and we’re reminding her to use her manners. And that’s only the first 5 minutes.

That is how most of us go through our day. Well, you’ll have to excuse me. That’s how I go through it; I can’t speak for all of you.

That’s why, when I hear people speak of “never turning back” on recovery and being “free of ED”, I am skeptical. Did never turning back account for those six weeks post-birth when you couldn’t exercise because your body was healing and your mind when nuts because of it? No, it didn’t. And did being “free of ED” chide you relentlessly when you decided to restrict your eating when your father died because it was the only way you could cope? Yes, it did, because wasn’t I supposed to do this recovery thing perfectly? And here I was, nine years in, having a small relapse?

Being perfect at recovery doesn’t work for me because being perfect was the essence of my life-killing eating disorder.

It’s important that I can screw up at this thing, and know that it’s still ok. That it doesn’t mean this time I lose my job because I’m too weak; that it just means I go to more meetings and therapy. I think, unfortunately, this is a chronic disease, and that’s not marketable in the field of recovery. It’s not marketable to say, “You’re going to deal with a little of this for the rest of your life.” But that’s how addiction is. You have to keep an eye on it. It’s always in wait.

And keeping an eye on myself everyday? Is that a tedious thing? No, it’s actually a beautiful, heartbreaking and staggering undertaking that has only served to better me as a person. I’ve heard people in self-help meetings claim they are grateful for their addiction, and I jive with that. The things I’ve discovered about myself due to this journey. And, I think it’s really healthy and humble when one can name all the parts of themselves. The addict, the fighter, the daughter, the singer, the crier, the writer. To dismiss one part of yourself, even a dark part, would be doing a disservice to yourself.

Don’t get me wrong; I hope to God I wake up tomorrow and magically have the hypomanic get-up-and-go that I usually have; I hope I go for a run and get those wonderful ol’ endorphins rushing. I wish I could have someone else’s brain. But I don’t. I have an eating disorder and I can’t drink and I have depression. The grace in all of this, the marker that tells me that I’m growing, is that I now know this too shall pass. I didn’t always know that. And that’s a gift that didn’t magically appear to me one day. It came to me after years of hard work on myself that really wasn’t all that simple.

I love Jewel. Go f$%6 yourself. I love running to Jewel at the end of my workouts, cooling down while simultaneously basking in the imperfections of her folky, yodel-y, touchy-feely birdvoice. And I love the song Goodbye Alice in Wonderland; it is my story. As my bad knee started to kick in at the end of my run, and I rounded past the cemetery back to my apartment, her voice warbled into my ears,

Fame is filled with spoiled childrenWe grow fat on fantasy

And internally, I stopped;

because that was the story of my food addiction.

******

I grew up with big dreams. I dreamt of becoming a musical theater star, and of falling in love with the perfect man at 25 and having this perfect family that would make up for any trauma I experienced. I dreamt of leaving the little town I grew up in and never fit into, and moving to the big city and showing everyone that I was really meant for something bigger.

The problem with big dreams and being a big dreamer is that you often live not in the real world but inside your head, and you don’t seek outside help or opinions and ideas. You rely on magazines and images and other people’s injured self-esteem to tell you what is right and standard and spin a world so small that you can’t see outside of it.

Translation? I thought I had to do it all perfectly, and look like the 113 lb, 5 foot 11 chick in People (yes, they used to post their weights in the 90’s, and yes, I remember it because I will always have an eating disorder I am grateful for). And I did it! I lost 65 lbs in five months, because that’s what it took to fit in and be beautiful and be happy.

You see, I was “fat on fantasy”, just like Jewel said. Because things were sad, and disappointing, and just plain tragic growing up, I escaped into fantasy. It’s all I had, before I realized I could escape into food. I escaped into the glamorous life I would lead someday, being successful and perfect and beautiful and therefore worthy of some man’s love.

And in that fantasy, I despised fat. Fat meant failure and disappointment and wanting too much and loss. But I was wrong; physical fat isn’t bad; it’s just fat. Yellow, squishy fat. But what was bad and what was hurting me was the fat fantasy I lived on. I didn’t live in reality. Into my twenties, I lived in a world where I rehearsed social situations and scenes that never took place because I was scared shitless to step outside of it. Things were dramatic and romantic and dreamy in my head, and messy and unpredictable and scary outside of it. And the more I expected my reality to be like my fantasy, the more I starved and binged. It isolated me from that messy, unpredictable world – when I used behaviors, I didn’t have to feel anything.

I think I’ve gotten better. I know I’ve gotten better. When I first put down unhealthy behaviors, I could barely carry on a conversation for fear of what others thought of me; now I can banter a bit better. But my “fat fantasy” still remains in bits and pieces – it’s there when I expect my relationship to be perfect 24/7 in order for it to be long-term, or when I think everyone should act perfectly at a party I host. The fantasy still bugs me.

And poor fat! I projected all of this fantasy onto fat, this morally-meaningless substance and made it bad. When you know what? It never was. It just sat there. And it sits beautifully on me and others today. Today, I understand that a size 14 woman who is honest with herself is way better off than a size 2 who isn’t. It may sound trite, but it took me a long time to get there.

So to those who get annoyed by my truth-telling; I do it because it’s hard and because I can’t afford to grow fat on fantasy again. I do it because I see the world as it is, not as it should be or how my partner wants to see it or how it might look with an Instagram lens. I do it because it’s how we move forward. I do it to survive.

So, I’m a little late to the game. Apparently, for a few years now, some schools have been including a BMI (Body Mass Index) score on children’s report cards. In 2011, The Huffington Post reports that BMI scores are “the latest weapon in the fight against the growing obesity epidemic in children”. I’m sure you can already guess my reaction to this, but before I get into the more objective reasons, I’ll include a little personal history.

You all know I was an overweight kid. An overweight kid who carried a lot of shame about both her body and imperfections. Those imperfections included my less-than-stellar grades in math. Report cards, a necessary evil, filled me with anxiety and dread every quarter. Why? I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t a perfect student; I occasionally turned in homework late and periodically made careless mistakes on tests. I held a deep level of shame due to these peccadilloes – I feared I was a bad person because of it. I feared my parents’ reaction to it and hated myself around report card time. “I should be doing better”, I would mutter to myself.

Can you imagine the amount of shame I would have had if BMI’s were added back in the 90’s? Can you imagine the ridicule I would have gotten from fellow students? Can you imagine the reaction from “trusted adults”?

Let doctors and nutritionist do their jobs, and let teachers do theirs. Is it important that we model a healthy lifestyle for children in our schools? Absolutely. Teaching them to obsess about a number is not modelling a healthy lifestyle. Especially when schools continue to pack their vending machines with candy bars and less-than-healthy foods. Hello, mixed messages? More importantly, who are the people who are trained to deal with an individual’s weight, activity and nutrition level? Their PCP. Their PCP can do a much more thorough job of determining whether or not a child is healthy or unhealthy. Better than an index number. And better than an untrained teacher or administrative personnel who is transmitting this information to a child. (I’m not knocking teachers, I just think it’s clear kids’ personal doctors are probably better equipped to assess that stuff.)

BMI’s can trigger, but not cause, an eating disorder. I’m a firm believer that a multitude of factors need to be in place to cause an eating disorder. But, an environmental trigger like a BMI report card can trigger a child who is already predisposed to having one. Kids at school are already influenced by bullies at school telling them they need to weigh less, wear better clothes, or don more makeup. But if adults told them this? We may forget adults in our lives wielded an unusual amount of power, power that has the ability to influence us for decades and haunt us. Some kids may not care two ways to Sunday if a trusted adult in their life tells them they’re fat. But a vulnerable child? A child who comes from a traumatic home or has low self-esteem to boot? They’ll take that as truth, and they’ll run with it. People vulnerable to eating disorders tend to be people-pleasers, and if someone tells them to lose weight, they’ll do it. I personally know someone who has been triggered by BMI report cards. This is no joke.

BMI’s are not the most accurate predictor of fat mass. In general, can it tell you if you need to lose weight? Probably, I’m not a doctor. But there are other scales – two are Body Fat Mass and Percentage of Body Fat. It’s completely possible to have an obese BMI and a normal or overweight score for BFM or PBF. I’ve also known people who weight train, lose inches from their waist, and watch their BMI scores rise. Go Kaleo talks a LOT about this (she’s a WARRIOR, check out her blog/fb page). And, here you can see how she’s clinically overweight by current indexes. Ridiculousness.

BMI scores are not going to change a perpetually unhealthy household. I’m guessing that national health advocates are hoping that BMI scores will “wake up” parents who don’t keep a good eye on their child’s nutrition. As in, maybe they’ll change their family food habits if they see their kid weighs too much. Mmmmkay. I believe this might work for a total of two weeks. Why the cynicism, you ask? Well, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the majority of households who constantly feed their kids donuts, soda and McDonalds may not have access to food that is healthier and therefore, higher-priced. So, there’s financial blocks, and there’s mental blocks too. I’m going to go a step farther – which may get me in trouble here – and posit that these same families may not be in the best place mentally or spiritually. And the solution to this is not a number on a report card. It’s a change in family communication patterns or beliefs. You don’t work from the outside in and put a band-aid on it; you treat the actual wound. Bottom line, NUMBERS NEVER HELP PEOPLE TO LOSE WEIGHT OR CHANGE LIFESTYLE BELIEFS.

Isn’t the medical profession’s oath “Do No Harm”? I can’t take credit for this one. A couple of weeks ago, on Good Morning America, one of their medical correspondents “weighed in” on this subject. GMA had interviewed several teenage girls who had communicated that the BMI scores ultimately made them feel bad about themselves. The reporting medical correspondent insightfully noted the medical profession’s possible betrayal of its oath. If GMA’s small-scale interview translates to the rest of the teenage population, then harm is being done.

Is obesity healthy? No way. But neither are eating disorders. Our nation has missed the mark and swung the opposite way with food obsession. We uselessly obsess about gluten and sugar and numbers. And I’ve harassed you all before about the dangers of obsessing about food and numbers. Obsession about numbers = obesssion about outside appearance = not solving your food issues. But working from the inside out works every time. Building your child’s self-esteem through encouragement of esteemable tasks? Works. And modelling a balanced diet and positive self-esteem will protect your children from any imbalance. But an index number? No way.

A BIG thanks goes out to Liz for sending me this posting by Nate Milsham. Nate writes about the difficulty, pain and triumphs one experiences when trying to support someone with an eating disorder. (I’ll go on record and say it’s one of the most difficult disorders to support.) His wife has been battling ED-NOS for years, and in this post he details his sensitive observations of her and the how the outside world treats women.

I remember a time, long ago, when the internet was just a household fledgling and Sarah McLachlan played nonstop on my Walkman.

It was 1996, and I was so unhealthy and sick when it came to my body image. Now keep in mind, I was also the thinnest I’d ever been. Weighing twenty pounds less than I should have, my body cried out for nutrients. But because I’d been told by many a person that I was “Super-skinny”, I decided it was finally OK for me to wear a bikini. So I bought one and wore it on vacation to Panama City to visit my half-brother, who was stationed there at the time.

And I hated it. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin the entire time we went to the ocean or a water park. I was paranoid people were staring at my body fat and shuddering in disgust. When I developed the pictures from the trip, I despised looking at my stomach in them. It seemed to pour over the bikini bottom and just looked, well, gross.

(And the fact was, it was just ill-fitting, and I was so weak I had no muscle tone.)

Fast forward eighteen years. (Excuse me while I go have an age-related heart attack.) I’m twenty pounds heavier, have had a child, and have some rumply skin right above my belly button since giving birth to my daughter. I also have some rumply skin underneath my arms, just a little bit, that’s popped into existence over the past couple of years. I have stretch marks, but I’ve had those since I was a kid.

Before this recent Fourth of July weekend, I briefly contemplated buying a bikini. I hadn’t worn one since that trip to Panama City, and thought maybe I was finally in the right head place to do so. “No”, I grimaced to myself. “My abs don’t look like those people’s I see on the beach. I’m too white. I’m suppposed to be tan. People would laugh.”

Then, I realized, I was listening to my old eating disordered voice, and f%$& that s*$%.

I’d been listening to it all along. Who the hell CARED if my stomach looked fish-white? I’m supposed to look like that, I’m Scottish, Irish, English, German and French! Who the hell cared if my bikini bottom was too big and someone saw my ass for a second as my daughter climbed onto me? It was at a freaking family BBQ. I realized I’d been missing out on being me, crazy, “who gives a shit”, outspoken Amanda all these years because I was listening to an old tape inside my head.

So I picked out a polka-dotted bikini, and I wore it on the Fourth. And here’s the reasons why I think I was ready:

I stopped giving a shit about what others thought of me. Was this easy? Hell no. It probably took about eighteen years! But – the second you realize the things people say about you negatively are directly related to the way they feel about themselves, you are set free. Seriously. So that friend who always makes comments about what you’re wearing and how you look in it? Probably hates herself. And her body hate doesn’t have to influence the way you feel about yours.

I gave love to the places on my body that needed it. Some of you may remember the “Tummy Love Project” that I started on here. I never finished it on the blog, but I finished it in real life. One of the reasons I never wore a bikini was the amount of hate I had for my stomach. So, I meditated about it, I gazed at it lovingly in the mirror, and I strengthened it (I find in my recovery that muscle strengthening exercise does not trigger me, but instead makes me feel empowered.) You may be laughing at the gazing at it part, but it worked. Why? For years, I’d been pretending it wasn’t there, silently excluding it from existence. For the first time, I acknowledged it and respected it. And that started the hate loss.

I respected my body for what it’s gone through. The funny thing is, before I’d given birth, I loved my body way less than I do now. Part of it is – I didn’t know what I was working with before. I didn’t know that I had this amazing body, capable of producing and giving life to this world. Again, you may claim corny, but I say it’s astounding that women can do this, and be up and walking the next day. It’s a miracle! So, I respected my body – and flaunted its magical prowess when I wore a bikini. I gave birth, goddamnit.

I’m sorry if you read this article expecting some miraculous not-yet-discovered secret about weight loss that made me look bikini-ready. I was only bikini-ready because I finally loved my body and respected it, not because I had finally achieved some weight loss goal. My head had to be in check to wear one. Interestingly enough, I was less bikini ready when I was thinner.

So here I sit, in my bikini, writing this out in the sun on our front lawn while my little one naps. My legs are pale white, some fat hangs over my bikini-bottom (PS, we all have it when we hunch over)…

So this lady’s argument is that there’s this common theme today of saying “real women” are only size 14, with curves, and that thin or healthy women get shit on in regards to being “real”. If you scroll down, she tells you that she was one of the overweight women in the second set of pics, and then she became a bodybuilder. Can I tell you something? I agree with ONE of her points. And that is:

There has been a backlash against slender people since the body-acceptance movement. It’s true. I bet most naturally-tiny people have felt discriminated against at times, with the boatloads of body acceptance size 14 memes floating around the internet. The truth is, all women who don’t have botox and don’t photoshop their pics have “real” bodies.

But I don’t agree with the rest of the article. And here’s why.

1. One thing that bothers me is the name-calling. Lady, how ’bout you don’t shame people by telling them they have “shitty” eating habits.

2. She’s using her story in the wrong way. This gal apparently lost like 50 lbs or so. OK, good for you, I was overweight as a kid too and lost it (albeit through unhealthy ways.) Just because I am society’s standard of “normal” doesn’t mean you see me taking the “real women” movement personally. I’m confident enough to know I have a real body, a body that is just as real as those size 14-ers. It’s like a white person crying because black people have their own equality organizations.

3. I’m sorry, but if you’re a bodybuilder, I’m guessing you use extreme measures to maintain your appearance.

4. WHAT ABOUT DEPRESSION? This lady makes losing weight/getting healthy seem supremely easy. And you know what? It is, for some. But others have to battle co-existing illness like depression and anxiety which compound the ability to lose it. You don’t have a choice when you have depression; it’s a disease and you have symptoms that prevent you from making choices.

5. And oh yeah, there’s class status. Not everyone is white and middle class and is able to shop at Whole Foods!

6. And lastly, God. Lady, I am guessing when people say “God gave me this body”, they mean their genetics/biology. And guess what? That does have an impact. I’m never going to be Anna Kendrick-sized, but I’m also not ever going to be Geena Davis sized. Science does, in fact, happen!

Bottom line: I just hate that women like this get 47,000 likes on an article of this quality, which is basically a shot to get money and publicity through emotional manipulation. And my little blog just plods along…albeit happily…

I thought I’d share some “blissful” moments in my ED recovery as part of Blissful Body Fridays. I was thinking back to some turning points in my recovery, and this one stood out to me today:

The day I started exercising for my mind, and not for the way my body looked.

THAT was a miracle, ladies and gentlemen, and if I could make this shift, you can too.

Let me explain a little about my process, and where I was at that point in my life.

It was about two years ago or so; I had moved to Winthrop in an apartment by myself, on the beach. I had just moved out of the Somerville apartment I had terrorized occupied for six years prior. By this time, I had given up a bunch of old, self-defeating habits and was feeling pretty good. I was pretty busy in the evenings, so I realized the only time I could work out was in the mornings. I had never done that before because I hadn’t taken care of myself enough to feel ok about running at 6am.

So I tried it. And I loved it.

Why?

1.My workout was done by 6:30, and I had the rest of the day to do what I wanted;

2.Any anxiety that I had about the upcoming day was erased by the rush of endorphins;

and

3. I felt powerful for the rest of the day.

And on days that I wouldn’t workout or wait until the evening, I would notice that my mood would be a little more quiet, my thoughts a little more racy.

(That’s why it’s so easy to become addicted to exercise! You become addicted to the “high” of it. It’s a tricky balance I still have to examine.)

So that’s when I realized I was working out for my mind, and not the number of my waistline.

Which was a pretty big effing deal for me.

Exercise became a lot more fun for me when I started doing it for my mind. Before, it seemed tedious, something I had to “get through”.

And I believe I have been able to exercise long-term because I do it for my mind. When I did it for my body, I did it in 3 month long increments (or so), and then would give it up for another six.

So, what about you? Has exercise been helpful or hurtful in your body image/ED recovery/journey?

Meta

My mother, who is compassionate to a fault and takes care of all living things, even the insects, complains when I don’t tolerate family gossiping about me because she is more committed to order than justice. She wishes I would try harder with people who have told me I never should have been a mother. […]